“I’ll Take Her!” – The Mountain Man’s Choice Shocked the Entire West

Chapter 9

They married in June.

No church — the nearest one was three days’ ride, which was not a distance either of them found persuasive, and neither of them had a prior relationship with organized religion that suggested the investment would pay. They stood in the meadow above the cabin where the blue wildflowers came in thick each summer, the frozen lake below them now a mirror of sky, the granite cliffs behind them catching the morning light in the particular way that made Simon, on certain mornings, stop whatever he was doing and simply stand.

Hattie Jenkins came up the mountain for it, which required a feat of physical endurance that she performed without comment or complaint, arriving at the cabin the evening before with a bottle of actual bourbon and the expression of a woman who has decided to be present for the things that matter.

A federal judge named Aldous Crane, who had presided over the dismantling of the McGra syndicate and taken a professional interest in the principals of that case, officiated. He was a compact, precise man from Massachusetts who had come west twenty years earlier to administer territorial law and had found the territory considerably more interesting than Massachusetts. He read the ceremony with a dry formality that suited both of them better than anything more elaborate would have.

Elena wore the mountain lion coat over a dress Hattie had brought from Bitter Creek, wrapped in paper and carried uphill on a horse that had objected strenuously to the final switchback.

Simon wore a clean shirt. It was, Elena noted, the same deliberate understatement he brought to everything — the architectural drawings executed in a spare, elegant hand. The gold found in veins no one else had known to look for. The cabin built to last not for a season but for decades.

He said his vows with the same economy of language he applied to everything that genuinely mattered to him, which is to say he meant every word precisely and did not use extra ones to approximate the weight of what was exact.

Afterward, they ate venison from a buck Simon had taken the previous week and drank Hattie’s bourbon in the meadow while the afternoon light went gold across the peaks, and it was one of those rare occasions that fully equals its own significance in the moment of its occurrence, without requiring retrospection to become important.

Hattie left the next morning, descending the mountain with the same stoic efficiency with which she had ascended it, pausing only at the tree line to turn back and look up at the cabin once, and then at the two people standing on the porch. She raised one hand. They raised theirs. Then she was gone into the trees.

The summers passed with the particular richness of summers that are earned. The extraction operation grew, slowly and deliberately, according to principles Simon had set from the beginning: extract at a rate that the land can sustain, pay wages that make the work worth doing, invest the profits in the communities that the operation touches. It was not the fastest way to extract the value from the Badlands claim. It was the only way either of them was willing to do it.

Elena proved to have inherited her father’s precision with geological survey and a facility for the financial architecture of large operations that she had not previously known was available to her, having been raised in an era that had not encouraged women to discover such things. She found it now, at thirty-one, in the same spirit she had found the Sharps — as a tool that fit her hand well once someone had cleared the space for her to pick it up.

They built a second structure adjacent to the cabin — larger, with proper glass windows and a room that was purely for the library, which had outgrown Simon’s original shelving by the end of the first year. The geological texts multiplied. So did the volumes of philosophy, and the works of fiction Elena had been sending away for since the previous December, and the engineering journals Simon subscribed to under the assumption, which proved correct, that the problems of the Wyoming Territory were not entirely unlike the problems of the industrialized world and could be illuminated from either direction.

Arthur Blake’s pocket watch hung from a nail on the wall above the drafting desk. Not as a relic of grief, though it was that too, but as a specific reminder: of what stubbornness in the service of integrity costs, and of what it makes possible.

In the winter evenings, Elena sometimes took it down and held it, feeling the warmth the metal gathered from the hearth, and thought about her father — his faith in the navigability of the world, his fatal insistence that good faith was armor enough — and she thought: he was wrong about that. The world is not navigable by goodness alone. But he was right about something larger. That what you build in it, and who you build it with, is the only answer to the question the world keeps asking.

She put the watch back on its nail.

She went back to the fire.

Outside, the Wind River Range held its ground against the sky in the way it always had, indifferent to the century and the season and the small warm light showing in the windows of the cabin nestled against its granite face — a light that was visible from a long way off on clear winter nights, burning steady and consistent in the high darkness, the kind of light that a man lost in the mountains orients by, the kind that means: someone is there, someone has kept the fire going, you are not as alone as you thought you were.

The End